Lauren Kaminsky
Dante’s depiction of the Christian afterlife was not only for Italians, and Puiu’s film is hardly specifically Romanian: it’s a universal human parable of life, cowardice, kindness, and death.
By her own account, The Last Mistress is Catherine Breillat’s most accessible film, the only one that doesn’t set out to break any taboos.
Like so much of the film, this cut makes literal what in the novel is philosophical, and some ideas made material are worse for the wear.
Day Watch may be a lousy vampire movie and an aggressive assault of light and sound, but beneath all that it’s also a brilliant essay on justice, gender, class, and politics in contemporary Russia.
Despite Pedro Almodóvar’s reputation for portraying sexual outrageousness and deviance, most of his films are pretty straight.
A Real Young Girl captures the darkest, least explored realm of sex and selfhood: undefined and aggressive adolescent female sexuality, when they cannot yet know what they want but charge forward as though they do.
9 Songs is one of the most sexually explicit films to play in mainstream theaters the world over, albeit with limited distribution—the inevitable triple-X ratings it will receive here and there will be indispensable free publicity.